


ekecheiria

by vastlight



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Relational Introspection, The Road to Breaking the Olympic Truce to Start Shit with Your Best Friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27425566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vastlight/pseuds/vastlight
Summary: Sendai, Irvine, Rio, Tokyo—some offered moments of perspective, from all over the world.
Relationships: Implied Iwaizumi Hajime/Ushijima Wakatoshi, Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru, implied Hinata Shouyou/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 14
Kudos: 86





	ekecheiria

I have wanted all the world, its beauties  
and its injuries; some days,  
I think that is punishment enough.

— Maya C. Popa, _Dear Life_

_38.2682° N, 140.8694° E_

Oikawa Tooru's last match in high school concludes with the slanted rays of the setting sun shattering westward against Mount Funagata and the autumn rain at night bringing the first layer of interweaving orange-and-yellow leaves on the ground—is how Oikawa absolutely insists on retelling the story years later in dramatic renditions of his high school volleyball career.

"No, listen, I'm setting the scene for the story, obviously the weather matters! Be _quiet_ , would you, you're leaving me with no choice but to start all the way over. Now, you would think that turquoise would clash with—"

Meteorologically speaking, all Oikawa can actually really remember of the day is the cold. It isn't yet fully winter, but Sendai has settled well into the annoying in-between where single-digit temperatures have become more of a constant trend than not.

"No." On the bus, Iwaizumi fixes him with dead eyes. "Do you know what your problem is? You check the weather five seconds before you step out of the house, and then you telepathically will the sky to bend and match whatever you'd already planned on wearing instead of just adding layers like a regular person."

"Well, I don't see why it shouldn't," Oikawa says with a haughty sniff, sliding further down into his seat. "Every unnecessarily bulky jacket I have to add to my ensemble is a complete loss in my book."

"It's just too bad you live in Sendai, then," Iwaizumi snaps in response, but his thigh is warm where it's pressed against Oikawa's, and so is the scarf he removes shortly after. Oikawa _does_ think that turquoise clashes against this particular shade of red pretty harshly, actually, but he takes the proffered olive branch for what it is with a pleased hum nonetheless, turning his back out the window to observe the full trajectory of a falling leaf.

—

Sometime during elementary school—or maybe it was the very beginning of middle school, actually, Oikawa can't really recall the exact details of the progression of their shared interests and how each of them intersects with year—Hajime's room is littered in Ultraman figurines, pages haphazardly ripped from magazines, and the Specium Ray stance becomes their nonverbal greeting of choice every morning before school.

It devolves, gradually, into a more generalized tokusatsu and kaiju-focused obsession, even though Tooru's mother frowns every time she catches them playing on the TV.

"Hey, what would you want for superpowers? You can't say anything really lame like super speed, though."

"Super strength, then," Hajime says automatically, because if Tooru's odd addendums to his odd questions snooze, then they will lose.

Tooru redirects the pebble he'd been kicking along the entire walk home to aim directly at Hajime's shin instead. "No, really, I wanna know!"

"I dunno." Hajime shrugs lightly. He'd recently taken to wearing his backpack slung over one shoulder. Even though he thinks it makes him look older and cooler, Tooru knows that his range of movement has been severely restricted to about three centimeters in any direction, lest it cleanly and completely slide off. "What's yours?"

"I don't know, I asked you first!" Tooru says in a huff. During his attack on Hajime he'd lost Pebble somewhere to the cracks of the sidewalk, so he stops to dig around for a new one to resume kicking until they get home.

"I'm trying to come up with something cooler that no one else has done before. But I was thinking today, what if we don't think superpowers are real because they're so small we don't notice them, and they won't even be used for fighting or whatever, just stuff like—" Tooru stops for a second to consider his most recent subject of annoyance "—always getting the USB key right on the first try, or something."

"That's really stupid," says Hajime. "That's not so much of a superpower as it is, like, a superdeficiency."

"Just because Ishii-sensei said we need to start using vocabulary words in a sentence doesn't mean you can just use it in _anything_ —ow, Hajime-chan, _ow_!"

When the seasons change again, one by one, the Ultraman cutouts are phased out of Iwaizumi's room. In their place are issues of _Volleyball Monthly_ and scattered kneepads; a framed Handa autograph, worth their combined 100 yen and a decade's worth of synergy.

—

 _Tobio's a better setter than I am_ are words that have been etched deeply into his brain with repeated repetition, almost like a ritualistic mantra. Like the process of turning a technique over through repetition until it's pure instinctual muscle memory, until the words themselves have been naturalized as fact.

"You've always had it in your head that there was something you had needed to make up for," says an image of Iwaizumi. "You don't think you were born a _'prodigy.'_ Have you ever even stopped to ask yourself what that means?"

"What what means?"

"What it even means to _be_ a prodigy. What, you think Kageyama was just preternaturally destined to be good at volleyball? What do you think you've been doing since elementary school?"

"If you're giving me that shit, Iwa-chan, you might as well also give me a gold star sticker for effort to go with it," sniffs Oikawa, delicately inspecting the tips of his meticulously filed-down fingernails. _"Ow!"_

"I'm being serious," says Iwaizumi, scowling as the rebounded ball returns to his hands. "You don't think that's worth something?"

The thing is, Oikawa does think he gets what he means. He does get that instincts are something to be honed and aptitude is something to be cultivated. But beyond even just giving it his 120%, Oikawa has always breathed passion and churned it into skill. Dedication, naturalized.

_I don't think you'll ever be happy, even if you live to be a hundred years old. Even if you win all the biggest tournaments out there, I can't see you ever being satisfied with perfection. Instead, you'll devote your whole life and soul to the pursuit of volleyball._

_You're the greatest partner I've ever had, and the best setter I've ever known._

"You just can't lose sight of what you wanted in the first place," Iwaizumi finally says in an even tone. "You should do it, Oikawa. But you do it deliberately, and you make it count."

_33.6846° N, 117.8265° W_

Ushijima isn't exactly the _last_ person Iwaizumi would expect to run into in California, but if he had to draw up an itemized shortlist he's sure that Ushijima would make the top three.

"Well, you sure don't _sound_ surprised," says Iwaizumi with a wry quirk of his mouth. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Ushijima speaks simply, and he's exactly as reticent as Iwaizumi always knew him to be in school. For the first time since his early teens, Iwaizumi sees the self-assured, confident set of his shoulders for what it is, rather than the arrogant impudence that they'd projected onto him. 

Ushijima is remarkably easy to hold a conversation with, Iwaizumi notes with no small degree of surprise. He's an attentive listener, and even Iwaizumi can grudgingly admit now that Ushijima himself had always been courteous, though it's true that he had no use for being polite. He's never dealt in anything but simple truths; absolute and undeniable, just like the strength that Iwaizumi knows rests within his fingertips. Removed of circumstance and the one person whose simmering rage against the Herculean Ushiwaka always blazed on with the interminability of the Olympian eternal flame—in the back of Iwaizumi's mind, he vaguely registers his own recognition of Ushijima as one of relief. 

"Hey, listen, there's this new disgusting artisan coffee place that just opened about a block away…" 

—

The eighteen months between graduation and flying out to California Iwaizumi spends in a haze of trying to balance as many required credits as he can handle at a local prefectural university before he's finally eligible to transfer out to Irvine. In the intervals of morning drives to lectures and long nights spent dozing off face-down in his textbooks with friends from class—when his phone buzzes like an alarm with a string of Line messages comprised more of kaomojis than actual discernible human text, Iwaizumi finds a new equilibrium established at daybreak.

—

"So Oikawa's off in Argentina now," Iwaizumi feels the need to add during a lull in the conversation when he reconvenes with Ushijima after his scheduled meeting with Utsui. Small talk, he reasons with himself. A point of commonality from their shared past.

"I heard the rumours," says Ushijima easily in response. 

"Yeah," sighs Iwaizumi, fiddling with the cardboard sleeve of the disposal coffee cup full of what, despite the already crumpling receipt for six dollars in his pocket, honestly just tastes like an extremely normal latte. Ushijima holds his herbal tea with both hands like he's either making an offering to a deity or six years old. "He's giving it his best shot, I guess."

Ushijima simply looks over at where Iwaizumi is seated next to him on the ledge semi-expectantly, patiently waiting for an elaboration of anecdotal factoids that Iwaizumi isn't entirely sure is his to give.

_Yeah, he always said he wanted to play abroad when we were growing up._

_The Rio Olympics are coming up next, aren't they, and he hasn't said anything but I just have a feeling he isn't going to come back home in time._

_He's never been someone to just lay back and let the linear progression of life play out. Yeah, honestly, Oikawa's fucking crazy._

_Japan is thirteen hours ahead of Argentina, but now that I'm here I'm actually four hours behind._

_He's going to go on to set for so many more aces in his career, but mine stopped with him as the best damned setter I've ever had._

"Well. But I hear you're not doing so bad for yourself, either," Iwaizumi says when he pulls himself together.

Ushijima's face is as impassive as ever, and god, it _really_ doesn't irk Iwaizumi the way it did in school anymore. "I suppose."

"It would really suck if _the_ Ushiwaka went down as just a not-too-bad player," muses Iwaizumi thoughtfully.

There's something about Ushijima that makes him want to drop any sort of pretense, as if he's got laser vision that sees through any and all bullshit. Maybe that's what was always setting Oikawa off whenever they were within a kilometre-long radius of each other, actually. Or maybe Iwaizumi's really just glad to finally see a familiar face so far away from home.

"As someone who lost to you way too many times, that's really not something I'd want to see."

It's a loaded statement, and Iwaizumi has about three seconds to regret his candour before he sees the thoughtful look in Ushijima's eye.

"A lot of people say that, you know," he says finally. "I suppose I've got a lot riding on this. But I have always thought you a worthy opponent, Iwaizumi-san." 

Iwaizumi recalls very suddenly the heavy deep-seeping bitterness he'd always used to bite back whenever he had the misfortune of observing one of Ushijima's intense stare-downs with Oikawa; the insinuation that Oikawa would have proved a better player on a team as mechanical as Shiratorizawa, that Oikawa could have ever had a place on the court without Iwaizumi. In retrospect, even through the humiliation of a defeat earlier than they'd ever expected, Iwaizumi now finds it fitting, that it was never going to end with Ushijima. He gives a short nod.

"And you," says Ushijima after a few moments of silence. "You intend on pursuing sports science, then?"

"Yeah," says Iwaizumi. It hadn't been a surprising choice for him. He'd never really seriously thought that he would go pro, but ditching volleyball completely had never really been an option, either. _Plus,_ he'd said to Oikawa a few weeks before graduation, _haven't I already been cleaning up after your dumb ass for years? Yo, do you think I can add that to my CV, that I've been an unpaid personal caregiver for eighteen years?_ "Thanks to you and your dad, I have a potential internship lined up for the summer, and maybe a grad fellowship, too."

"I'm glad to have helped," Ushijima says in his ultra-serious way that speaks to every iota of intention behind his words. By now, in the heat of midsummer Californian dusk, Iwaizumi's gotten somewhat accustomed to the singular burning intensity of it, even in the most simple expression of sentiments.

—

"Thank you, Iwaizumi. Until next time."

A renewed, familiarly blank slate, he finds, in a city eight thousand kilometres away from home. Somehow, he finds that the dry, hot Californian air no longer aches in his lungs.

"Would you want to do another 'silly one,'" offers Ushijima not unkindly, after Iwaizumi taps the shutter on his screen about twenty million times.

"Sure," he says, grinning as he swipes through the miniature Iwaizumis making a variety of increasingly shittier faces next to a static, and mostly completely stoic, Ushijima, looking with every bit of his typical Ushijima expression like he's posing for a passport photo. "Yeah, this is perfect."

Oikawa used to say, back in their Seijou days—in his typically obnoxious way, so loftily exaggerated and oversaturated with flashy Oikawa Tooru megawatt grins and peace signs that very few would ever think to look behind the meaning they obscured—that it was volleyball that brought them all together, and in the game of life, the ball rarely ever fully touches the floor. Iwaizumi hasn't played a proper game in a year or two, but here he is with Ushiwaka at the doorstep of his apartment, backlit by the setting rays of the Irvine sun.

 _Yo, you'll never guess who I ran into in California._ Shared point of commonality—that, or certainly something like it.

_22.9068° S, 43.1729° W_

Under the harsh sun, the sand had been almost scaldingly hot when Oikawa first arrived at the beachside with Fernando and Alonso near midday, almost like the soles of his feet would certainly burn if they were to touch the surface of the sand for longer than a couple seconds at a time. In the nighttime, though, with the visible departure of the sun it takes almost no time at all for the remaining heat to drain completely from the beach, leaving a cool breeze in its wake.

"I think we should probably head out soon," says Oikawa to his teammates, getting up and trying his best to dust himself clean of beach. It's mostly in vain—the palms of his hands themselves are stained. "Find something to eat around here."

As they walk back in the direction they'd come from past where the beach volleyball nets had been set up, deeply engaged in a heated argument with Fernando about the merits of barbecue vs. feijoada, Oikawa starts. There's a horrifically familiar shout. He tears his gaze away from the tabs of travel guides and listicles on his phone that he'd been busy referencing and weaponizing, and it leads him straight to an absurd shock of orange hair.

—

"You're so _freaking good!"_ Hinata shouts, and Oikawa blinks owlishly for a moment in the face of his full-fledged earnesty before he feels the gradual stretch of his lips into a low, private smile.

It gets like this sometimes. Oikawa somehow feels as if he can somehow count each individual grain of sand against the soles of the feet, sees as if filtered through some sort of sci-fi data mask the exact parabola of the ball's trajectory in slow motion, visualize in hyper-precision detail the optimized point of attack.

On the other side of the complete chaos that is the sinking viscosity of the sand and the unpredictability of the wind, Oikawa finds a specialized form of control. For once, it's just two of them on this side of the court. He has, obviously, played plenty of practice games without a full team, but it's different with beach volleyball. It calls for a completely different approach to collaboration, Oikawa thinks vaguely as he sets the ball to Hinata. The back and forth rhythm of the ball making its familiar receive-set-spike connection pattern before it's sent flying back across the net—now something shared only between the two of them.

As surely as the consistent ebb and flow of the waves crashing onto shore, Oikawa finds that even the wind and the sand can be worked to an advantage. He tosses the ball in a perfect arch over to where Hinata— _Shouyou_ —is waiting with a shout and a truly delightful glint in his eye, and slams it down into the sand in a clean line shot. 

—

"Ninja Shouyou and Watanabe Ken," Oikawa sighs into the neck of a beer bottle a couple hours later. "You know what? I'll say there's definitely a certain ring to it."

Like everything else Hinata does, when he laughs it's with his whole body. He's always been almost annoyingly infectious and animated with everything he does. Against the hundreds of games he's played in the last decade and a half, the two-matches-plus-a-couple-rallies he'd played against the Karasuno lineup his final year of high school—well, they hardly seem like anything at all. But they're not something Oikawa would deign to let himself forget.

 _That feeling of becoming able to do something,_ Hinata had said, that first night they'd run into one another in an absurd twist of fate. _It's fun. No matter how many times I feel it._

Oikawa knows what it's like to chase that feeling better than he has an understanding of most things in life. The monotonous act of repeating jump serves when he was fifteen: the incremental increase of its power and speed he could discern with every passing day, but the _aim—_ he remembers keeping a mental count in his head every night, of each serve that sent empty water bottles knocking down on the wooden floors like bowling pins, weighing them up in ratios against the ones that flew way past their mark. Oikawa felt it like the dull pulsing ache of his knee on cold, rainy nights, knowing that the initial injury is what did the most damage but the lingering potentiality of repetition never really goes away. The sinking feeling that if he went home on a missing streak it'd inevitably carry over to the next day. The gritting realization that practice like that only meant further entrenching his own mistakes, that it meant nothing if he wasn't doing it _right._

And, of course, that in itself had been a deeply ingrained bad habit he had to have forcibly knocked out of him. But laid out in such simple terms by Hinata, he feels more deeply than ever that it's only the most primal enjoyment of sport that's remained the longest, beyond all the statistics and strategizing and the politics of navigating through a foreign professional league. Like digging his heels deep into layers of searing sun-warmed sand to feel the reassuring cool that remains underneath. Stripped bare of all else, the unmistakable _joy_ when he feels the leather of the ball against his palm.

And, well. There are some things he can afford to be flexible on, so long as he doesn't lose focus of the one thing he's always wanted.

"You could probably make a _movie_ out of that!" chortles Hinata, punching the air around him in quick succession. He almost knocks over several empty stools around him before turning to apologize in rushed Portuguese. Oikawa just grins over at him before slumping further against the counter, his fingers drumming out a steady rhythm on the wooden surface.

—

Oikawa tosses a mostly full bottle of sunblock and a half-full package of face masks over to where there are 170 centimetres of Hinata Shouyou sprawled on his hotel bed. They land haphazardly near the back of his head, and Hinata turns to fix them with a cross-eyed stare.

"You'd better be grateful," Oikawa tells him. "Shipping's really not cheap on those things. And on top of that, of course, there's also the incomputable, astronomical cost of me flying out all the way to Brazil to make this personal delivery to you."

"You talk so much, Oikawa-san," Hinata groans into the mattress. "Why am I even doing this again?"

"This isn't Japan!" Oikawa exclaims, affronted. "You're out in the sun all day long. I can't believe your face is still in tact as it is."

Oikawa thinks he might have thrown a full-fledged fit at the state of Hinata's tap-water-and-a-prayer skincare routine. "We're going to do face masks and paint our nails and tell each other about boys," he'd announced like a declaration of war the moment he'd fished out his keycard at the door of his hotel room, but then Hinata had given him a look that was difficult to mistake for anything else, and, well.

Oikawa sets a timer on his phone before leaning back against the headboard and grabbing the remote. It's currently set to the hotel's default welcome channel, and the never-ending loop of elevator music was starting to get on his nerves. There's not a lot of channels available without charging extra money, but he thumbs over to the sports channel, half habitually. At night, in the absence of the channel's regularly scheduled broadcasts, it shows in flashing montages the highlights of the Rio Olympics in different disciplines.

Men's volleyball is allotted such little play time that the Japanese team isn't shown at all, but the irony doesn't escape Oikawa, of running into Hinata halfway across the world and being here, in this hotel room, observing the flashing images on the screen. It's quite different from the way Oikawa used to feverishly fixate on taped games as a pre-tournament ritual in high school; instead, all it is with the volume turned down to a low hum is a momentary snapshot taken of a laidback, serendipitous quiet. They don't try to talk under the sheet masks, but as the timer on Oikawa's phone goes off and the broadcast switches to medal ceremonies he looks over at Hinata's closed eyes and knows that he must be one to truly understand how vast, how interconnected the world of possibility is.

—

On the flight back to San Juan, he looks at the motionless lock screen of his phone as the plane touches down and begins taxiing on the ground to a notification of an automated album, already dubbed _Trip to Rio de Janeiro_. He smiles down at the screen, faint and thin, and turns off airplane mode even as the overhead NO CELL PHONES indicator light decidedly still glares back at him. Thumbing over to his messages, he hovers briefly over a dated, sporadically-updated conversation thread, close to the bottom of his screen. Connect—wasn't that it?

_35.6762° N, 139.6503° E_

"Wow, would you look at me," says Oikawa as he walks in to a chorus of loud jeers, gesturing grandly to the selection of light-blue-and-white paraphernalia scattered all around the site of their gathering. "I've turned my entire graduating high school class into traitors to the flag."

"Not me," says Iwaizumi, who valiantly refused to let Kunimi get anywhere near him with those goddamn tattoo stickers he's been brandishing like weapons. "I'm not even really here."

"This has nothing to do with you, Oikawa-san," Yahaba chimes in from where he's starfished across the couch. "Maybe it's just that merit is more important to me than geopolitical identity."

"That's still an indirect compliment," Matsukawa dryly points out. "No backhanded insults, Yahaba. You have to actually _commit_." 

"Call it what you want, but this is playing out exactly how I always wanted and all is now right with the world." 

"You wish," says Iwaizumi even as he pulls Oikawa into a one-armed hug in greeting. He's too warm, having just come in from the crushing humidity of July in Tokyo.

"Damn, you guys are technically enemies right now, aren't you," remarks an amused Hanamaki. "I never even thought of that."

At the same time that Oikawa arches an eyebrow and drawls, "My very own best friend _Iwa-chan?_ How dare you, Makki," Iwaizumi says, "What made you think we were ever on the same level enough for me to even consider him my enemy?"

Oikawa levels a glare at him while a chorus of hyena cackles break out around them.

"Now, now, children. Break it up, Cap," says Matsukawa monotonously. "You too, Viced Cappuccino," he turns to direct at Iwaizumi with a nod and a mock salute. 

"That joke has never once been funny. It's actually deteriorated over time. Do you take destructive criticism?"

"Yeah, yeah." Matsukawa waves a dismissive hand vaguely in his direction. "You guys do know that the Olympic Truce is a thing, right? Ceasefire on all conflicts in the name of sportsmanship and friendly competition? I don't have to remind you?"

"Only Oikawa could co-opt the Olympic dove as a symbol of violence instead," Hanamaki laments mournfully.

"It's like you guys never even spent three years on a team with me," says Oikawa with another over-exaggerated humph, and the room collapses once more into an ensemble of jeers. It's such an achingly familiar scene, pulled apart by time and space, only to be repackaged into Hanamaki's crappy does-not-fit-a-horde-of-grown-men living room. Iwaizumi can't help the odd and insistent pull of nostalgia in his chest, the way he can never seem to help but to revert back to his adolescent self in the presence of their old team. 

—

"Well, obviously I can't stay _here_ ," Oikawa is saying to Kindaichi. Iwaizumi notes with no small degree of amusement that Kindaichi still, to this day, can only ever seem to carry himself around Oikawa with a thinly contained air of polite terror.

It's late and they're loitering in the Seijou gym, just about wrapping up one of their last remaining group practices ahead of the playoffs for Nationals. "Just think about it for a second. There's too many possibilities that I'd have to work _with_ someone I'm sworn to enmity. Iwa-chan, you've seen the hard drive."

If he digs deep enough through his desk drawers, Iwaizumi is sure he can still find all of Oikawa's meticulously and manically prepared Seijou VBC success plan documents he'd copied onto an USB key and shoved into Iwaizumi's bag at the beginning of the year, citing obligatory vice captainly duties. The Ushiwaka Defeat Spreadsheet had a tab entirely devoted to the ideal mise en scène of how Oikawa wants to make him cry. It was ostensibly a joke to anyone else who would ask, but Iwaizumi knows better.

Iwaizumi can't hold in a snort even as he does his best to swallow down the heavy tugging sensation in his chest. "You are the most twisted person I've ever met in my life."

"Defending champion, fifteen years and counting!" Oikawa crows, pumping a triumph fist into the air. Kindaichi, completely and utterly bemused, bows awkwardly before making to head back over to the net and start picking up some of the stray balls on the other side.

"Kindaichi, don't worry about it," Iwaizumi calls over. "You can go ahead and get changed, we're done here for the day."

As Kindaichi makes his quick escape back to the change room, it's just the two of them, Oikawa and Iwaizumi left on the court. Oikawa slips under the net, picks up a ball and fixes Iwaizumi with a look. Iwaizumi doesn't stop to think about what that translates into. Without even bothering to send a nod in his direction, Oikawa's stepping back and tossing the ball up in the air, sending it over to Iwaizumi's side of the net. It goes straight up in a perfect dig—they both already know.

—

"Well, if it isn't Iwaizumi Hajime, my vaguely familiar acquaintance from work." Oikawa half-jogs, half-saunters up to the door when it swings open to the Team Japan cohort entering in time to start setting up for their officially allotted practice slot. Iwaizumi can tell even from a distance that while half of his teammates are still loosely scattered in a semicircle around the head coach—Blanco—the other half are doing, in all honesty, a hilariously bad job of coming across like they aren't staring. 

"Cut the crap, Oikawa," he responds as shortly and neutrally as he can, because he knows without even looking back at his team that there is no way Miya is even _trying_ to seem like he isn't blatantly sticking his nose into Iwaizumi's business.

Oikawa beams at him for a second before lightly punching Iwaizumi in the shoulder and darting around him instead. _"Shouyou!"_

Hinata greets him in kind. It's true that Iwaizumi had laughed multiple body parts off when he'd first become a recipient of, surely, the worst selfie that's ever been taken in the entire southern hemisphere, but it is still such a wildly _bizarre_ intersection of people that he doesn't think he'll ever fully get over it.

He gives it two minutes before he has to step in and forcibly extricate Hinata from what sounds like the world's most weirdly paced conversation with the most wildly incomprehensible transitions and sends him in the direction of his coaches and teammates. Oikawa sticks out his tongue at Iwaizumi, the exact spitting image of his elementary school self when he'd seen it on TV and decided to adopt it for himself for the rest of foreseeable future, and makes a couple of incredibly specific threats at him and his career before joining the rest of his teammates back on the other side of the court, in a sea of blue.

A snort comes from behind him. Kuroo Tetsurou, with the promotions team. The camera crew he usually strings along him for practice is absent this time, and he's leaned against the wall with his weight on one leg and his arms crossed. _"Man,_ you communicate weird. You sure this dude's your best friend?"

There are times along the way it had felt like the way they'd evolved into near-telepathy as teammates had somehow become an added burden on their efforts at keeping in contact, the creeping fear of being too much, not enough. Over time, Iwaizumi has witnessed the gradation of Oikawa Tooru—from the scratchy polyester of Kitagawa Daiichi's navy tracksuits to the light Seijou turquoise, all the way into the intense hues of Argentina blue; richer, and entirely more vibrant as he settled deeper into himself.

And now they're here, once again back on the court—Iwaizumi thinks that his true north has always pointed firmly and head-on to the magnetism of Oikawa Tooru.

"Yeah." He turns to Kuroo. "Of course." What could be more fulfilling than the satisfaction of a win against the person you trust most in the world?

**Author's Note:**

> seijou reunion couldn't possibly have happened because none of them were actually in tokyo for the game except hanamaki but what's a little shelling out bullet train tickets for your captain and vice captain's olympic debut


End file.
